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Turns out it's a fork of KDE 3, with comparable goals to the Cinnamon fork of GNOME 3. I guessed it had some connection to KDE from the logo, but for whatever reason the home page doesn't say anything about KDE. So I went into the FAQ, which does mention KDE, but does so in a way I find odd:

>What is TDE?

>TDE is the Trinity Desktop Environment. The project was initiated by Matthias Ettrich in 1996 and originally called the K Desktop Environment.

>Why the rebranding and renaming efforts? Why not continue calling the software KDE?

>The "KDE" name, various logos, and related efforts are trademarked by the KDE Foundation. Since the Trinity project is not affiliated with the KDE Foundation, legally we can't use their trademarks.

It's like the FAQ is trying to hint that TDE is the "real" KDE, a continuation of the same project initiated by Matthias Ettrich (who, afaict, has no connection to TDE), and that the KDE Foundation's project is an impostor. But the FAQ page doesn't quite make that claim explicit, or provide justification for it, so I don't know what to think. The Wikipedia page on TDE is also of no help. Does anyone know if there's a backstory?

The whole project is a fork of KDE 3, including the documentation. The FAQ is based on the KDE 3 FAQ (https://web.archive.org/web/20080212212628/http://docs.kde.o...), which is why you see the wording you do. AFAIK there's no bad blood between KDE and Trinity, and the KDE developers let the Trinity developers use their infrastructure when the project was getting started.

From the About page:

> The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) version 3. The name Trinity was chosen partly because the word means "three" and TDE was a continuation of KDE 3. TDE now is its own computer desktop environment project.

> The TDE project was founded by Timothy Pearson. Timothy is an experienced and skilled software developer and was the KDE 3.x coordinator of previous Kubuntu releases.

> It's like the FAQ is trying to hint that TDE is the "real" KDE, a continuation of the same project initiated by Matthias Ettrich (who, afaict, has no connection to TDE), and that the KDE Foundation's project is an impostor.

Certainly that's one interpretation. The other interpretation is exactly what is said and no more. Where did this "imposter" accusation come from?

The wording as-read certainly makes it sound like that: A fork of a thing is not that thing. Thus this is not KDE, it's a fork of KDE. Thus this wasn't originally called the K Desktop Environment, it's a fork of something that was originally called the K Desktop Environment.

Viewed in this context, the second point sounds weird: it was never rebranded, the fork was called TDE from the beginning, and the reason it can't (shouldn't) call itself KDE is because it isn't. What the KDE leadership calls KDE is KDE.

They claim that they are the same project that was initiated by Matthias Ettrich in 1996.

They also kinda imply that they would use the KDE name, if they were allowed to, but someone else owns the rights for it. ("Why don't you do this very natural thing?" "I am not allowed to.")

They indeed don't claim or imply that the KDE Foundation is an "imposter". They also don't say anything about whether the KDE Foundation is also a continuation of the same project.

KDE up until version 3 was very configurable and robust. KDE 4 was neither. Basically it seemed just like a (bad) copy of GNOME and other recent DE efforts. That's why there's this fork.

[flagged]

The fact that TDE exist is great and proves that unlike other OSes where you are forced to upgrade everything to whatever the OS developer wants and have no choice in the matter (aside from not upgrading, which isn't a real option because both hardware and software support drops like flies over time) regardless of how this affects your workflow, on Linux you can simply get to have all the latest stuff under the hood (kernel, drivers, etc) while at the same time preserving the workflows you want.

Some elbow grease might be necessary - like all the time the TDE developers have put towards their project - but the important part is that it is possible.

That said, i do think that TDE would benefit from a couple of more aesthetically pleasing themes in the screenshots - even the original KDE3.5 default theme (preferably with a bit less gradient galore) would be better than the current shots that look like a hodgepodge of themes thrown together.

I haven’t kept up with Windows over the recent years but it looks like Cairo Desktop exists that allows some degree of shell customization in that world. Many years ago lots of shell options like LiteStep existed (they weren’t the most stable, but they existed). Many were likely hacked out solutions as they hooked in via replacing the explorer library IIRC.

So while in Linux it’s intentionally modular, I wouldn’t say it’s the only place it’s possible. Maybe the most practical, for sure.

As we move more to service oriented everything though, that becomes increasingly less feasible. I suppose to some degree it’s more flexible because web apps at some point give you all the rendering code locally to muck with however you may want to but the frequency of change in UIs on top of its complexity seems like this world will always be unapproachable for customization, and that’s for services that are using browsers. Forget it if theres some local application doing rendering (like the Microsoft app with Azure services).

The problem with Windows is that you do not have the source code so you rely on excessively brittle hacks. For example when i was using Windows 8 i used to run some program that forced some handle that uxtheme used to close which caused controls to fall back to using the classic win9x theme (which was disabled on the UI in Win8) - and for that to work it had to freeze some system process for a bit, force the handle to close and unfreeze it. That process worked for Win8, it broke on Win8.1 until someone found a workaround but you had to replace some apps with alternatives to work and was completely broken on Win10 (and i guess Win11 too) and was never fixed.

Meanwhile if i desire i can download the official source code for Gtk and modify the painting code to be as pixel perfect as i want (and in fact i did exactly that some years ago to make XFCE look like Windows 95 because the available themes looked off :-P).

For webapps, yeah you can't do much but personally i prefer local apps where possible anyway - and for the other stuff, if i care enough, Stylus and Greasemonkey are there to help. I do use a custom Stylus theme i wrote for HN for example :-).

This was a lifesaver during the early KDE4 years. Most projects it's wise to avoid .0 releases, but for KDE4 even up to .4 or so it was questionable. Thankfully this catastrophe didn't repeat for KDE5.

There are still KDE3 features I miss that neither KDE4 nor KDE5 has ever had. The one that sticks out in my mind is the ability to edit the start menu directly, rather than having to move to a weird parallel world.

That does remind me though - why isn't "icons on the desktop" a thing by default anymore? I'll admit I stopped bothering to go edit the defaults for every new install, but why?

> why isn't "icons on the desktop" a thing by default anymore?

Wide screens and HQ displays. More pixels, more space, less need for maximized windows as maximized windows look ridiculous on modern setups.

Most people make the windows smaller, sometimes with other programs next to them, sometimes alone. Often you have them floating and you don't want icons ruining the view or being distractions, this way the desktop becomes a wallpaper or infinite backdrop of art to your windows to let you focus. It's very zen and peaceful to open a window in the expanse of space.

> That does remind me though - why isn't "icons on the desktop" a thing by default anymore? I'll admit I stopped bothering to go edit the defaults for every new install, but why?

They actually made "Folderview" (the mode where the desktop shows all files inside the ~/Desktop directory) default again for new installations in Plasma 5.10, released 7 years ago.

https://blogs.kde.org/2017/03/01/plasma-510-folder-view-defa...

Because very few people used these icons?

How many program positions on your desktop can you reliably remember without having to search? Isn't it just about the same amount as you can fit in the menu bar you've got on KDE/unity/gnome? And if you've gotta search, isn't the launcher with fuzzy search quicker anyway?

> How many program positions on your desktop can you reliably remember without having to search

This is why being able to move the icons where you want is helpful: takes advantage of spatial memory :-).

(though on Linux where i use Window Maker - and thus have no desktop icons - i just use task-specific workspaces and each workspace has its own icons/launchers on the clip for the stuff i use most often, which acts as a workspace-specific dock)

> Because very few people used these icons?

I'm not sure about this explanation. Almost everybody has icons on the screen of their phones amd tablets, and multiple pages of them, and they seem to remember well were those icons are.

What about an end user, to whom say, you sell a tablet with software they asked you to write. It works like a champ.

If they close it, odds are having a shortcut on the desktop they can just tap to re-open it would be most welcome. No?

In case you didn't notice, mouse and keyboard on a PC with a non touch display has a very different input scheme and consequently can't be compared like that.

If something works well on such a platform doesn't man it's useful on the other

Indeed. Menus are searchable, desktop contents rarely are (and if they are, the search results look like a menu anyway).

I didn't need to search for it, I had them in groups and used spatial memory.

nowadays I've just given up on desktop environments entirely and just use xmonad and dmenu. I got fed up with people having their own ideas of how my computing experience should be.

In related tech media reporting:

    A new version of the Trinity desktop is out, with a new window-snapping feature. And that's not the only way it's snappy.

    The Trinity Desktop Environment (latest release 14.1.1), or TDE for short, is a fork and continuation of KDE version 3.5, the last release of KDE 3. It's loosely comparable to MATE, which is a continuation of GNOME 2 after the developers moved on to the radically different GNOME 3. KDE 4 wasn't as radical a change, but it introduced a significantly different design based around customizable widgets called "plasmoids."

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/trinity_desktop_q4os/

KDE 3.4/3.5 was gourgeous.. must have been around 2002 when I had just ditched windows for good and went all in on gentoo linux. Over and over, I had following impressive experience: I would have an intuition of where I would expect a feature to be or how a widget would interact, then while executing on it, quickly retract my expectation ("nah, this probably won't work this way, even though it should..") only to find it actually did work as expected. That was so0Oo amazing xD and it obviously disintegrated completely with the botched release of #plasma KDE4".0". That was when I moved on to xfce.. When I learned about TDE a bunch of time later though, I actually used it for a couple of years. It was still "kool" , even though the aesthetics felt somewhat aged. Back to xfce for a long time now..

I went to look at the screenshots, saw armarok 1.4.10, got excited thinking they'd brought it back, and then got sad when I realized the screenshot was from 2011.

Actually Amarok did see a revival in the past year or so! https://blogs.kde.org/2024/04/29/amarok-3.0-castaway-release...

They've recently pushed out a new release with the code base ported to Qt/Plasma 5 and are now going for Qt/Plasma 6.

Popularity of streaming services like Spotify and closed clients, I hardly use Amarok.

Just because I looked that up recently, there are at least three forks based on amarok 1: Exaile (a GTK port), Clementine (a fork towards Qt4) and Strawberry (a fork of Clementine, I don't know the background).

Isn't Strawberry [1] a quite acceptable continuation?

[1]: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

They do have a somewhat maintained fork of the amarok 1.4 line that more or less works the way I liked: I've been using when I want to listen to music on my linux desktop. I think it's forked from a bit before the late amarok 1.4 releases.

EDIT: here's the latest changelog: https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Changelog_For_R14.1.3#amarok

Many people still love it. For me, KDE 3 was fine but caused sever eyestrain when I used it. I never had an interest on going back.

But I am glad it exist, it proves you do not have to make changes "just because", but just change to make it run a bit better, eliminate bugs but keep the same "soul".

FWIW, I stick with fvwm, now on v3.

I'm curious what caused you eyestrain if you ever found out? Small font or something more?

My eyes have minor issues, but the largest contributor were the colors. At the time with fvwm I had no issues at all.

KDE4 was better but the issue still existed. KDE5 I can last most of the day. Hoping KDE6 is better. FWIW, Gnome* also never caused issues.

I did spend lots of time looking for a color theme for it and in the 4.0 days I found a theme I think was called "happy_eyes", it worked with minor tweaks. For KDE5 I found calm-eyes.

Back then you were probably using CRT or some other low-res monitors which would have given you eye-strain regardless.

I wish that was the case, but it carried over to LCD when the CRT monitor fizzed out. Also as mentioned, just about any other environment caused me no issues.